Have you ever read the children’s book, “City Mouse, Country Mouse”? In it the advantages of country life and city life are set side-by-side through a daily walk with mice in each setting. As I return from my from country life to my life in ex-urbia, I feel the tug of the experiences of the two mice inside of me. I am in the city, missing the country. When I am in the country, I miss the city. I appreciate both.
Returning to urban parts of Massachusetts from rural parts of Pennsylvania, all of the buildings, even streets, seem too big. I feel dwarfed. The difference in scale between the two settings is remarkable. The rural town in which we live for a time in summer would be swallowed up by the city of Arlington: 3,000 people to 50,000. But it is more than that. The urban buildings are wider and taller, there are so many of them with no fast escape into vast, open spaces.
On the other hand, the mountains that surround our country borough are grand and omnipresent and make the city seem very limited. We live in a valley surrounded by their protective presence. And where small towns end, vast fields of grass and corn and other crops spread out before us. Everything is green. I could feel small in the presence of this world too, but I don’t. I somehow feel free.
The difference in economics also reflects the difference in scale. Homes in our small town are affordable and some are run down. Many are for sale again. Most people live on modest incomes. Increasingly, people on welfare live in our town, and there are at least as many people renting as owning homes. There are no higher educational institutions near-by. The closest is forty-five minutes away and not many who graduate from high school go on to college. The only places we can walk to in our town are the general store, the churches, the borough hall, and the neighborhood bar. The library which was once in town is now one town over.
Initially, I felt that there were more drugs in our rural town than in our suburban setting. The town got rid of its one police officer a few years ago. However, when we returned home, the local papers reported a drug bust down the street. Who knows? Drugs are everywhere; so are those who don’t use them.
What I miss most as we return home to our urban setting is the nature that surrounds us in Pennsylvania. The open expanses of green dotted with animals and vegetation. The occasional tractor or Amish buggy on the road and the minimal traffic. I almost said the slower pace, but, for those who work, the pace is much the same as it is here.
What I appreciate when we return home is the diversity in the population here, the more liberal outlook on life, and the cultural and educational opportunities, which are so abundant that it is sometimes easier to ignore them all than sort them out.
I suppose my point in writing this is to put in print my own country mouse/city mouse experience. This is a vast country and we can never forget it. I love being able to actually live in both places even if my time is not equally divided between the two. I know that my head belongs to the city. My soul lives in those mountains. My heart embraces both, along with the streams and rivers which flow through town and country, and the ocean which touches the Massachusetts and Jersey shores. And I love the good people who call both places home.
PS. I do know that in Pennsylvania there are urban places, I grew up in one. And in New England, there are rural places, our son and family live in one.